Hang With Friends

Information

Come on in, pull up a chair!

Picture yourself spending some time with congenial friends, sharing your lives and pictures from your cell phones." They're curious about that cool game, song, movie, camping trip, art show, or other event that fascinated you. You talk about all kinds of stuff, poetry, styles, personal achievements, relationships, and bad days. You can share your inner child, and laugh together. They sympathetically listen to your feelings about serious topics like politics or climate change, even when they don't agree.

Personal validation comes from paying attention to one another, giving more than you get. Everyone respects you and themselves, despite our amazing range of personal tastes and interests. They'll tell you they don't agree with an idea or behavior without implying you're a bad person or somehow deficient. It's an "I'm OK, You're OK" kind of fellowship, where nobody tries to make himself look better by picking on somebody else.

Nobody here is into mind games. A discussion started with a loaded guilt-throwing question will be deleted.

This group is not intended to compete with other groups on topics they cover but to "fill in the cracks." Whenever a discussion dwells at length on a topic for which there's an existing group, we urge you to provide members a link to that group to continue along their tangent.

A comment is a shout-out, which will get lost in a few days, because the comment wall is just a random stack.

Please start a discussion to share stories, photos, and videos. Replies will pop up in your "latest activity" and a conversation can develop from the feelings and thoughts you contributed. Groups are built on discussions.

Today, I heard Seth Andrews talk about the question, "If you could rid the world of one thing, what would it be?" My first thought was religion, but after a few seconds I decided it would be irrational or anti-scientific thinking. That would take…Continue

There's a young man, unconscious, found tangled with the bushes which describe the edge of your property, late one evening. Who is he? Where did he come from? These are the questions which confound Ward and Pam as they attempt to deal with a most…Continue

Yasmine Mohammed is not your average ex-Muslim. Not only did she get shut of Islam, she also managed to escape what was at one time the most notorious of radical Islamist organizations: Al Qaeda. She has since documented the story of her apostasy…Continue

That's perfect for Father's Day, Chris. I get the feeling fundamentalist christians wouldn't grasp the absurdity of the situation. If it's martyrdom, if must be good and righteous.

One of my favorite time periods for film is the late 1940's and early 1950's classic film noir. Dark and moody, raw and unforgiving, glamorous and gritty, femme fatales, crooked cops, mobsters, and lawless private eyes, all in beautiful black and white with brassy soundtracks

Another absurd thing: in the Greek Orthodox church, if a layman puts a foot into the priest's vestry the whole church has to be re-sanctified by the patriarch. If a woman puts her foot there, the church has to be re-sanctified TWICE.

Meanwhile, I attended the wedding of one of my wife's sons and his girlfriend this past Saturday. Between 2009 and now they've had four kids together and about two years ago decided to tie the knot. I was especially pleased to see the return of the same secular officiant who performed the ceremony not quite a year back with another of my wife's kids.

Another of the benefits of secular ceremonies: BREVITY! I don't think the whole thing went 15 minutes!

The wedding was between my second cousin and his girlfriend. They are in their late twenties and completely normal and great people. The bride's father is one of the priests of this church and he participated in marrying them, so I can imagine the insanely intense pressure put upon these two to have such a wedding ceremony. They have been dating for 8 or 9 years and they are a great couple. I know that they don't subscribe to the whole "man in charge/woman subservient" bullshit. For myself, no matter how much I loved someone, I wouldn't be able to bring myself to participate in such a ceremony, even just for show.

Like I said, it sure was an interesting experience with many raised eyebrows and eye rolls from me. I was sitting between two of my non-religious cousins, so we were able to share several whispered jokes between us. One priest chanted the story from the bible about the wedding celebration where the wine runs out and Jesus changes barrels of water to wine. It was strange to hear the bible chanted throughout the service instead of spoken. My biggest takeaway from the experience is that despite all the flashy pomp and circumstance, the priestly robes, the metered application of incense at certain locations, two priests seeming needed to kiss the gold plated cover of the bible, etc., is that absolutely none of these ritualistic acts are mentioned in the bible.